Pas De Do-si-do

Ballet Chicago To Swing Into Balanchine`s `Square Dance`

April 25, 1990|By Sid Smith, Entertainment writer.

In his extraordinary life and career, George Balanchine managed to practically equate his name with that of ballet, his chosen art, leaving behind an all-but-unfathomable catalog of 20th Century dance masterpieces.

For most aficionados, the name Balanchine conjures up another term, neoclassical, in part a reference to the way he melded his early Russian training with a new kind of formalism, steeped in structural and movement purity and often underscored by classical music giants. To the extent that he had any ethnic slant at all, that slant would probably be toward his native land: Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky inspired some of his most beloved works.

But for a time he went through a decidedly American period, clearly determined to bring to ballet some of the flavor and soul of his adopted land. Ballet Chicago`s artistic director, Daniel Duell, who enjoyed a long career as a dancer under Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, cites ``Stars and Stripes Forever,`` a 1958 work set to John Philip Sousa music, a famous example.

A year earlier, Balanchine had turned to one of our nation`s more tellingly indigenous dances for ``Square Dance,`` a work that despite its baroque music actually for a time used a caller to shout the moves as if guiding revelers in an Oklahoma barn. ``Square Dance`` will be the showcased new addition to Ballet Chicago`s repertory for its engagement Wednesday through Saturday at the Civic Opera House.

`` `Square Dance` looks purely classical, and it is,`` Duell said. ``But all of its formations and patterns are based on those of the American folk dance: the do-si-do, the exchange of partners, the circles weaving in and out.``

Why this particular piece for Ballet Chicago? ``Because of the difficulty of the steps and the energy that has to go into it,`` Duell said. ``The dance for each dancer is like dancing a variation on your own, almost as if every member in it has to perform like a soloist, and yet it`s a work for a whole group. Balanchine did nothing less than revolutionize the classical form, but he loved American enthusiasm and energy. He was pleased that we weren`t locked into a tradition in dance, that we represented a springboard to new things.`` That difficulty and that sense of a new horizon are intermingled in the choreographer`s technical legacy. Balanchine taught his dancers a new way to move, Duell said, and anyone who danced with him had to learn to find a stamina previously untapped.

``In general terms, he exaggerated all the physical laws. He developed what we call articulation, which is the approach of the foot, going onto the ground at the end of a leap, in a way that made the entire movement soft, controlled and rhythmically in place. Before that, you`d see a leap and then a more or less inevitable landing. You would slow down for a big jump, and that would butcher the music. He wouldn`t allow that, or anything that hinted at posing. If it was something in which you would be saving yourself, a rest, in other words, he just wasn`t interested.

``I remember when Misha (Mikhail Baryshnikov) first came to dance with New York City Ballet, he was rehearsing Balanchine`s `Donizetti Variations,`

and he said to me one day: `I don`t understand it. It`s incredibly exhausting, and I`m not doing nearly what I`m usually doing,` meaning his enormous leaps. The difference with Balanchine is that instead of a walk, then a rest, then a run and another rest, it`s constant dance.``

In the recent PBS special ``Dancing for Mr. B.,`` there`s a glimpse of Duell and Merrill Ashley in their New York City Ballet days together, performing a brief segment from ``The Four Temperaments.`` Just that glimpse reveals how much the work has degenerated in the many versions of it now performed without the on-the-scene guiding hand of Balanchine, who died in 1983.

With a living art like dance, how can such degeneration be avoided?

``I wouldn`t characterize it as degeneration,`` Duell said. ``As long as we`re responsible for the art form and move foward in our ways, we`re living up to our challenge. But in terms of his works being danced the way they were when he was alive, bit by bit that will disappear. One thing that makes that acceptable to me is that it was acceptable to him.

``He once said to me: `Fifty years from now, my ballets will be danced in ways that will make them almost unrecognizable. I lived for now. I wanted to do them in the time that I did them.`

``He would take the attitude, I think, that instead of preserving, we should make new ballets.``